Welcome to the first race of the Tour Down Under: The Cancer Council Classic. Every year Adelaide hosts a big cycling event called the Tour Down Under. This year is an extra special year because Lance Armstrong is riding in the tour and it is his first race back since retiring back in 2005. Adelaide is going Lance crazy. He is pretty much always one of the top stories on the news.
This is the race. It was around 50K and they had to ride around a 1.7K circuit 30 times. So we got lots of chances to see them ride by. They were soooo fast. As you can see in the picture they are just a blur. This was our first ever cycling event, so we had no idea what was going on, but we had a great time!
You can't see very well in this picture, but see those three guys in the back, the middle one is Lance Armstrong. He was riding for a team called Astana which is a team from Khazakastan I have no idea how the riders get on these teams. There were two US teams there, Colombia and Garmin.
Some of the cyclist before the race. They could be really famous, but I have no idea. Most of the cyclists were European.
Another potential famous cyclist.
This was the crowd where the announcers where announcing the teams. Our apartment is just behind that one with the blue railings. So the race was literally out our front door!
That guys in the black hat behind the tree's leaves on the stage in Lance Armstrong. It is pretty cool to see him in real life since he is one of the greatest athletes of all time.
This was the cyclists just doing a warm-up
Justin with all of our free stuff we got!
These were the promo cars throwing out the free stuff!
More of the promo cars.
On Saturday we went to Warrawong Sanctuary. It was were we went with Jenny and Ben at night, but we went during the day. We saw a lot less animals. This was one of the albino kangaroos.
Here is a red kangaroo.
Shhh...Platypus Playground. This was the place we saw our 3 platypus on the night tour. No such luck seeing them in the daytime.
Some friendly ducks who kept following us.
You can't see very well in this picture, but see those three guys in the back, the middle one is Lance Armstrong. He was riding for a team called Astana which is a team from Khazakastan I have no idea how the riders get on these teams. There were two US teams there, Colombia and Garmin.
Some of the cyclist before the race. They could be really famous, but I have no idea. Most of the cyclists were European.
Another potential famous cyclist.
This was the crowd where the announcers where announcing the teams. Our apartment is just behind that one with the blue railings. So the race was literally out our front door!
That guys in the black hat behind the tree's leaves on the stage in Lance Armstrong. It is pretty cool to see him in real life since he is one of the greatest athletes of all time.
This was the cyclists just doing a warm-up
Justin with all of our free stuff we got!
These were the promo cars throwing out the free stuff!
More of the promo cars.
On Saturday we went to Warrawong Sanctuary. It was were we went with Jenny and Ben at night, but we went during the day. We saw a lot less animals. This was one of the albino kangaroos.
Here is a red kangaroo.
Shhh...Platypus Playground. This was the place we saw our 3 platypus on the night tour. No such luck seeing them in the daytime.
Some friendly ducks who kept following us.
A friendly little wallaby.
This weekend was a great weekend! We started off Saturday morning by heading out to Warrawong Sanctuary to check out some animals. Then we ate at a great pizza place for lunch. That evening after dinner we went to Moonlight Cinemas and watched a movie under stars in the parklands. We saw the movie Burn After Reading with George Clooney and Brad Pitt. I had never heard of it before. It was okay, but I really enjoyed watching it outside! On Sunday we had a nice morning run and then for lunch we celebrate Sarah' s(Bob and Anne's daughter) birthday at a smorgasbord restaurant (buffet!). It was great! We had a lot of fun and ate way too much! Then we hurried home packed up a dinner (we thought we might get hungry) and headed off to the Tour Down Under to get prime seating. We arrived about 2 and a half hours early, but the time went fast. It was a great time and we had a lot of fun! We definitely need to learn a bit more about cycling because we are clueless!
That is our weekend in a nutshell. I leave for Sydney on Wednesday morning (6:00 am flight!) to meet my friend Jess, then Justin flies up Thursday night. We will hang out in Sydney until Sunday then fly home. And then we get to show Jess the great city of Adelaide for a week! We are excited! That is about it for now! We miss you all!
2 comments:
Yea!! Have fun with Jess. I miss you guys so much.
That is so cool that you got to see this! There was an article about it in that paper that we were looking at during lunch, and I bragged for you that it was near your house and that you had pix of Lance!!!
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